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UNOAR: Organ Transplant Clinic in Beirut

Part 2 Project 2020
Anastasia Lavrova
University for the Creative Arts | UK
UNOAR is conceived as a nomadic learning institution. In tandem with existing UN agencies, UNOAR aims to unlock the potentials of failed developments by combining the intrinsic material and spatial resources of vacant buildings with existing local needs and demands. The project translates the programmatic objectives of the UNOAR mission into a proposal for the Burj Al Murr in Beirut.

Designed as a hotel, the tower’s construction works came to an abrupt halt with the start of the Lebanese Civil War(1975). Having identified the current crisis of the public health sector in Lebanon in a second research strand, the thesis uses an existing WHO to fund organ transplant facilities as a stimulus to transform the vacant tower into a public clinic. The functional departments of the organ transplant clinic, which in conventional hospital design would be organised as horizontal adjacencies, are now vertically stacked within the tower.

In order to provide functionally effective connections between the different areas, two external lifts, stairs, technical services are located on the short sides of the building. Referring to the Lebanese vernacular of solar shading, new external skins of the Burj Al Murr create an environmental buffer zone to protect the climatically sensitive zones.



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2020
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